The first thing you need to do in order to write effective survey questions is identify what exactly it is that you wish to know. As silly as it sounds to state what seems so completely obvious, I can’t stress enough how easy it is to forget to include important questions when designing a survey. Let’s say you want to understand how students at your school made the transition from high school to college. Perhaps you wish to identify which students were comparatively more or less successful in this transition and which factors contributed to students’ success or lack thereof. To understand which factors shaped successful students’ transitions to college, you’ll need to include questions in your survey about all the possible factors that could contribute. Consulting the literature on the topic will certainly help, but you should also take the time to do some brainstorming on your own and to talk with others about what they think may be important in the transition to college. Perhaps time or space limitations won’t allow you to include every single item you’ve come up with, so you’ll also need to think about ranking your questions so that you can be sure to include those that you view as most important.
Although I have stressed the importance of including questions on all topics you view as important to your overall research question, you don’t want to take an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach by uncritically including every possible question that occurs to you. Doing so puts an unnecessary burden on your survey respondents. Remember that you have asked your respondents to give you their time and attention and to take care in responding to your questions; show them your respect by only asking questions that you view as important.
Once you’ve identified all the topics about which you’d like to ask questions, you’ll need to actually write those questions. Questions should be as clear and to the point as possible. This is not the time to show off your creative writing skills; a survey is a technical instrument and should be written in a way that is as direct and succinct as possible. As I’ve said, your survey respondents have agreed to give their time and attention to your survey. The best way to show your appreciation for their time is to not waste it. Ensuring that your questions are clear and not overly wordy will go a long way toward showing your respondents the gratitude they deserve. Related to the point about not wasting respondents’ time, make sure that every question you pose will be relevant to every person you ask to complete it. This means two things: first, that respondents have knowledge about whatever topic you are asking them about, and second, that respondents have experience with whatever events, behaviors, or feelings you are asking them to report. You probably wouldn’t want to ask a sample of 18-year-old respondents, for example, how they would have advised President Reagan to proceed when news of the United States’ sale of weapons to Iran broke in the mid-1980s. For one thing, few 18-year-olds are likely to have any clue about how to advise a president (nor does this 30-something year-old). Furthermore, the 18-year-olds of today were not even alive during Reagan’s presidency, so they have had no experience with the event about which they are being questioned. In our example of the transition to college, heeding the criterion of relevance would mean that respondents must understand what exactly you mean by “transition to college” if you are going to use that phrase in your survey and that respondents must have actually experienced the transition to college themselves.
If you decide that you do wish to pose some questions about matters with which only a portion of respondents will have had experience, it may be appropriate to introduce a filter question into your survey. A filter question is designed to identify some subset of survey respondents who are asked additional questions that are not relevant to the entire sample. Perhaps in your survey on the transition to college you want to know whether substance use plays any role in students’ transitions. You may ask students how often they drank during their first semester of college. But this assumes that all students drank. Certainly some may have abstained, and it wouldn’t make any sense to ask the nondrinkers how often they drank. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable that drinking frequency may have an impact on someone’s transition to college, so it is probably worth asking this question even if doing so violates the rule of relevance for some respondents. This is just the sort of instance when a filter question would be appropriate. You may pose the question as it is presented in "Figure 8.1".
There are some ways of asking questions that are bound to confuse a good many survey respondents. Survey researchers should take great care to avoid these kinds of questions. These include questions that pose double negatives, those that use confusing or culturally specific terms, and those that ask more than one question but are posed as a single question. Any time respondents are forced to decipher questions that utilize two forms of negation, confusion is bound to ensue. Taking the previous question about drinking as our example, what if we had instead asked, “Did you not drink during your first semester of college?” A response of no would mean that the respondent did actually drink—he or she did not notdrink. This example is obvious, but hopefully it drives home the point to be careful about question wording so that respondents are not asked to decipher double negatives. In general, avoiding negative terms in your question wording will help to increase respondent understanding. 1
You should also avoid using terms or phrases that may be regionally or culturally specific (unless you are absolutely certain all your respondents come from the region or culture whose terms you are using). When I first moved to Maine from Minnesota, I was totally confused every time I heard someone use the word wicked. This term has totally different meanings across different regions of the country. I’d come from an area that understood the term wicked to be associated with evil. In my new home, however, wicked is used simply to put emphasis on whatever it is that you’re talking about. So if this chapter is extremely interesting to you, if you live in Maine you might say that it is “wicked interesting.” If you hate this chapter and you live in Minnesota, perhaps you’d describe the chapter simply as wicked. I once overheard one student tell another that his new girlfriend was “wicked athletic.” At the time I thought this meant he’d found a woman who used her athleticism for evil purposes. I’ve come to understand, however, that this woman is probably just exceptionally athletic. While wicked may not be a term you’re likely to use in a survey, the point is to be thoughtful and cautious about whatever terminology you do use.
Asking multiple questions as though they are a single question can also be terribly confusing for survey respondents. There’s a specific term for this sort of question; it is called a double-barreled question. Using our example of the transition to college, "Figure 8.2" shows a double-barreled question.
Do you see what makes the question double-barreled? How would someone respond if they felt their college classes were more demanding but also more boring than their high school classes? Or less demanding but more interesting? Because the question combines “demanding” and “interesting,” there is no way to respond yes to one criterion but no to the other.
Another thing to avoid when constructing survey questions is the problem of social desirability. We all want to look good, right? And we all probably know the politically correct response to a variety of questions whether we agree with the politically correct response or not. In survey research, social desirability refers to the idea that respondents will try to answer questions in a way that will present them in a favorable light. Perhaps we decide that to understand the transition to college, we need to know whether respondents ever cheated on an exam in high school or college. We all know that cheating on exams is generally frowned upon (at least I hope we all know this). So it may be difficult to get people to admit to cheating on a survey. But if you can guarantee respondents’ confidentiality, or even better, their anonymity, chances are much better that they will be honest about having engaged in this socially undesirable behavior. Another way to avoid problems of social desirability is to try to phrase difficult questions in the most benign way possible. Earl Babbie (2010) 2 offers a useful suggestion for helping you do this—simply imagine how you would feel responding to your survey questions. If you would be uncomfortable, chances are others would as well.
Finally, it is important to get feedback on your survey questions from as many people as possible, especially people who are like those in your sample. Now is not the time to be shy. Ask your friends for help, ask your mentors for feedback, ask your family to take a look at your survey as well. The more feedback you can get on your survey questions, the better the chances that you will come up with a set of questions that are understandable to a wide variety of people and, most importantly, to those in your sample.
In sum, in order to pose effective survey questions, researchers should do the following:
- Identify what it is they wish to know.
- Keep questions clear and succinct.
- Make questions relevant to respondents.
- Use filter questions when necessary.
- Avoid questions that are likely to confuse respondents such as those that use double negatives, use culturally specific terms, or pose more than one question in the form of a single question.
- Imagine how they would feel responding to questions.
- Get feedback, especially from people who resemble those in the researcher’s sample.
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